Image by Janice de Santis

You set a great store by what you call the real world. “How will this help us in the real world?” you ask your teachers. “You need to live in the real world,” you exhort others. You think that everything of value to be had, exists there. If you only do, get, or become this or that, you will attain happiness.

 

 

But what is your real world?

 

Is it not only what you apprehend with your five physical senses? Is it not what you see with your body’s eyes, even though most of you do not see what is before you, but prefer to dwell in the past? Is it not only what you can hear with your physical ear, or taste, smell, or touch with your body? You are saying that nothing outside this world that your senses bring you, is real.

 

 

And why do you call it the real world? If this was all the world there was, what need would there be to give it an adjective? There would be no other world to distinguish it from. To call this the real world implies you know there is another world, which is placed somehow in opposition to this one.

 

 

What might this other world be like? Everything not available to the five physical senses would have a place there: faith, inspiration, love, invention, creation, joy, and guidance.

Friend, would you live without these?

 

Image by Janice de Santis

You can name which world you want, as the real world. Each one makes his choice. Is the real world this physical world of discord and suffering that you see all around you? Or is the real world a timeless state of endless creation, joy, and peace? Which would you have be the real world?

 

You get to choose, and choose again, every moment. When you choose each moment to live with God, evils are forgotten, superseded, left at the side of the road like useless old baggage. All stress, anxiety, and pain are gone, melted, dissipated, as you rise again, reconstituted in glory. Which world would you have be real?

 

 

It is only the mad little ego that bids you call the physical world “the real world”. But that which must be endlessly proclaiming its own reality, knows of its unreality. It protests too much. The ego knows its world is not real.

 

 

 

To pay attention to your physical world is like watching the constant, endless waves of the ocean, and studying their differences. That wave is shorter than the others. This one’s top is breaking off a little. A breath of wind has ruffled up another. You call it the real world but there is no meaning to be had in any of it.

What if instead you examined the world that your real world is set up to refute? Here in the physical world, everything is endlessly changing, waves upon a shore. There, is no time and no change. Here, things are imperfect and in constant need of fixing. There, is only perfection, and all is eternal.

 

Let all that is not helpful be swept away